Saints (19 page)

Heber left Clitheroe brimming with the Spirit, in a mood to fairly fly to Manchester himself. Practical considerations prevailed, however; no need to bother the Spirit with miracles of transportation when there were wagons and coaches going all the time. He jingled the coins in his underfilled pocket and decided he’d just as soon preach to a generous farmer as contribute to the wealth of a coach company. So he walked to the edge of town and hailed a farmer whose load was produce and not goods; bound to a town, not back home.

“I warn you,” said the farmer the moment Heber had clambered aboard, “I’m not much of one to talk.”

“I’m delighted,” Heber declared. “For
I
am, and you’re going to hear the greatest news you’ll ever hear in your life, Brother.”

“I’m a Methodist,” the farmer said. “What are you?”

“An apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, sent by the prophet of God to preach repentance to the people of England, including you.”

The farmer grunted, and Heber set to his task with a will. The man’s face might have been set in stone. It bothered Heber not at all. He’d preach to the devil himself and enjoy it—the gospel sounded as good in his own ears as it had the day he first heard it ten years before, and whether it pleased the farmer or not, it pleased Heber Kimball.

Not that he was without hope of converting the man. Miracles of conversion happened all the time. Oh, the first time Heber had come to England back in ’37, with Orson Hyde and Willard Richards and Joseph Fielding, they had baptized quite a few people, and when Joseph sent them back with the promise that the field was ripe and ready to harvest, Heber had expected to do some baptizing. But not on the scale they found! Wilford Woodruff had baptized the whole congregation of United Brethren down in Herefordshire, including fifty lay preachers. Hundreds were joining the church all over the West Midlands, and even as they put dozens of people under the water in a day, the apostles marveled to each other about the miraculous fulfillment of Brother Joseph’s prophecy. Indeed, Heber himself had reached a conclusion that surprised him. The Lord may have chosen America, the promised land, for the restoration of his gospel, but it was here in England that the people were readiest for it. “They’re jumping in the water faster than we can ordain priests to baptize them,” Orson Pratt had complained at Preston. And if this farmer seemed to have no more wit than his potato crop, that stolid face still might conceal a soul hungry for the gospel.

If it did, however, the farmer was able to conceal it from himself and Heber both. In Whalley the man turned west for Preston; Heber cheerfully got off the wagon and searched for transport south. He ended up walking through Accrington and Haslingden, but he didn’t mind. It was a fine May afternoon, his boots were reasonably comfortable, he had a delicious biting hunger in his belly that sharpened his attention to the countryside, and it was a brilliant opportunity to practice his hymn singing. He hymned his way thirteen miles to Edenfield and, it looking to be a warm night, bedded down in an uncomplaining haystack a hundred yards from the road.

The next day, however, the hunger had turned from sharpness to a definite physical disorder that had to be remedied. But it was friendly farmland here in the west reaches of the Forest of Rossendale, and he was fed two breakfasts by farmers who didn’t suspect when they invited him in that they’d be getting angels and apostles and the millennial reign along with his tremendous appetite. Still, they were good-natured about it, and while they confessed that they had too much affection for the vicar to want to offend him by hearing any more, they didn’t begrudge him the biscuits he tucked into his coat pockets for the road. “If you feed me, you feed the Lord,” Heber Kimball proclaimed, and they didn’t doubt it—the man, for all his rough American manners and bent for profanity at odd moments (“Joseph Smith is a damned fine man!”), could charm the shingles off the roof in a rainstorm.

And he knew it. But he didn’t think it was any virtue of
his
. He was just an ordinary potter, among other trades, until Joseph Smith touched his life and woke up within him all that he really was—and more. An apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ: he was still awed by the responsibility of it, even though he had become quite reconciled to it now. Well, these were perilous times, the millennium was only a few short years away, and the Lord was using the weak things of the earth to confound the self-anointed wise men who were running the whole she-bang to hell. If people smiled at Heber, he took it as a smile to the Lord, a reaching out of their spirit to find comfort in the gospel. If people pressed food on him, he accepted it as if they were lucky to have the chance to give it to him, because they were: it would be counted much in their favor in heaven, and for only small cost to them on earth.

Another farmer took him on in Edenfield right after his second breakfast, and Heber knew the Lord would be with him today. They began the descent through Bury into Manchester, Heber’s first visit to the great coal-burning, steam-driven, cotton-manufacturing heart of the industrial revolution. There was a congregation there already, he knew; he had the address of the branch president, William Clayton, a man he had baptized himself in another city three years before. He even knew that the industrial cities were going through hard times these days—there had been a taste of it in Liverpool and Preston. But nothing had prepared him for the abject poverty that worsened as they rode along Red Bank Road. The stink from the River Irk was offensive, of course, but his eyes suffered more than his nose, for he cared only for the people who sat or squatted in the early afternoon shade that narrowly fronted the buildings on the east side of the street. The farmers might have stone faces, but these people were made of ash; a breath could break them; their hearts were gone. Heber suffered with pity for them.

“My good friend,” he said to the farmer, “you have a wagon full of food and these folks are hungry.”

“I have a family back home gets hungry, too, so don’t start giving me milk of human kindness charity sermons or you’ll get off and walk.”

Actually, walking sounded like a good idea; the farmer had been unreceptive and as long as Heber stayed on the wagon there’d be no one else to preach to. He thanked the farmer for his generosity, urged him to think about the welfare of his eternal soul, and stepped out among the poor, who watched him incuriously. That is, until he began producing biscuits from his pockets; then he found himself surrounded by silent reachers, who did not touch him but jostled each other for place; he was hurt but not condemning when he saw little children pushed out of the way by some of the grown-ups; he took care to give food first to those who pushed least, where that was possible.

It took only a minute or two to shed the excess weight of bread from his pockets; in another minute he had distributed all the coins that had been given him by the charity of the Saints in Clitheroe. If their donations were turned from missionary work to feeding the poor, it would hardly lessen the value of their gift. Besides, it was as Joseph said: “Feed them first, then preach. A hungry man is all belly; feed him and he has a spirit again.” So Heber passed out all his worldly possessions to the poor, confident that these were spiritual gifts he gave them; and equally sure that the Lord would return his generosity fivefold.

He passed the new mills near Scotland Bridge, where he held his breath and walked briskly over the Irk, wondering how anyone could work near such a place, let alone live there. Then he followed Long Mill Gate to Todd Street and Hanging Ditch, carefully observing how the fortunes of the other pedestrians improved. It was in St. Ann’s Square that he finally found his spot. Plenty of people who seemed in no hurry; plenty of space for a crowd to gather; and a church a hundred years away, a very nice illustration for the remarks he intended to make about the Great Apostasy.

He used the colorful condemnations of the Great and Abominable Church, the Whore of the Earth, to draw a curious crowd. Then he began telling them the glorious story of the angel that brought the golden plates to Joseph Smith, the first prophet on the earth since the last of the ancient apostles was slain. He made it as exciting as he knew how—it was still early and he had a lot of energy. As he spoke, he carefully watched the faces to distinguish the scoffers from the listeners, the doubters from those whose eyes got brighter with excitement the more they heard.

A fair crowd, a dinnertime crowd, full of food and not too eager to get back to work. The rich, of course, passed by quickly; Heber Kimball personally doubted the Lord’s ability to get camels through needles’ eyes. And the poorest of the poor were begging surreptitiously and illegally on the fringes of the crowds, not listening either. It was workingmen and clerks who heard his message, and so, he knew, it would be workingmen and clerks who could come with him into the water to be baptized.

As he preached to and studied his crowd, there was one young man who kept catching his eye. The fellow was tall and thin with a face as pretty as a girl’s; doubtless still in his teens, yet dressed smartly and bearing himself with the dignity of one who was accustomed to dealing in the world of men, not of children. Heber especially liked the way he seemed to have to chew an idea a little before swallowing it. Heber foresaw in his interest the possibility of a conversation that might lead to a chance of holding a meeting in this man’s home.

The crowd began to dwindle as the dinner hour ended; Heber saw the young man start to drift reluctantly away. Quickly Heber testified that Joseph Smith was a true prophet, passed out a dozen tracts to people as he passed through the crowd, and caught up with the young man as he was turning the corner onto Bank Street.

“Young man, do you like to read?” Heber asked.

“I—yes sir, I do.” But the young man looked hurried.

“Here’s something for you to read.” He pressed a tract into his hands. “I know you’re late to work but it’ll take just a moment for you to tell me your name and invite me to your home for supper.”

The young man looked surprised, but then laughed. “You must be one of the Americans I heard were preaching here.”

“An apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, and I feel inspired to say that while you can feed my flesh, I can feed your soul tonight, and I will hunger again long before you do. My name’s Heber Kimball, at your service because I’m at the Lord’s.”

“I’m Charlie Kirkham. But I’m not very religious.”

“Only because you’ve never heard the true religion. The light of Christ is in every heart, and it made you reject the false doctrines taught by false churches. But your heart awakens to truth, and I prophesy the Lord holds greatness in store for you, if you have the courage to serve him as his true disciple.”

Charlie laughed. “You must be a prophet, friend—only God could get a word in edgewise. I live at number 80 Bradford Street. I’m not interested in religion, but my mother’ll want to hear you. Get on Canal Street from Great Ancoats, and Bradford bends off to the right. Mother always has supper ready at seven sharp. Or do you stop talking long enough to eat?”

“I have no compunction about doing both at once.” Heber gave him a second copy of
A Timely Warning to the People of England
. “For your mother,” he said; then he let the young man go. His mother indeed. Heber knew damn well the boy had felt the Spirit and was a prime prospect. Heber had seen that look a thousand times before. It always meant the Lord had led him to one of his own.

Three more sermons that afternoon in other places downtown, and then the tower clocks told Heber it was time to start searching for Bradford Street. William Clayton’s address was still in his pocket, but Heber figured that the already-baptized could wait another day to receive an apostle into their homes; it was the lost sheep the Lord sought first, not those already safe within the fold.

Matthew was out tonight. It would be late. He would come home with beer on his breath, full of politics and lust. Usually Dinah bore it stoically, making sure the children felt no upset in the rituals of evening; tonight, though, was one of those times when she could not bear it. To sit alone in the house after the children were asleep, waiting for the key to touch the lock. Or to lie in bed, unable to sleep for fear that fumbling hands would waken her in the dark.

So tonight Dinah took Val and Honor and set out for Mother’s house—for home, thought Dinah, for Matthew’s house was not home. As always, she opened the door without knocking. And then stopped on the threshold, for a great bear of a man was leaping to his feet and rushing toward her, his hand outstretched.

“Come in!” he cried enthusiastically. “Glad to have you! I’m about to preach to this good family, and they’re terribly afraid I’ll bore them, so the added company will help them stay awake.”

He spoke in a harsh American accent, and he shambled when he walked, as if he had never worn a suit that fit. Yet he was acting the host as if he owned the house. Dinah was angry that he would invite her into her own home. Dinah was angry at his coarseness in a home that had always been filled with grace, even in poverty. Dinah was angry that he was so strong and that Charlie and Anna shrank weakly into the background behind him. Most of all, she was angry that on a night when she needed her family, a stranger should be there. Dinah raised her eyebrows and met Heber’s grin with a look of such aloofness that it stopped the American cold.

“Beg pardon,” the man said. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Heber Kimball. I’m an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Dinah did not answer him directly. Instead she spoke to Anna. “If I had known you had company, Mother, I wouldn’t have come to call.”

“Come in, Dinah,” Charlie said. “He’s an American.”

“That explains his accent, but it doesn’t forgive his boorishness.”

“Don’t be cross,” Heber said. “In America we believe in being friendly.”

“It’s all right, Dinah,” said Anna. She held out her arms and took Honor from Dinah.

“This is England,” Dinah said. “Charlie, will you introduce us?”

“Dinah, this is Heber Kimball. Heber, this is my sister, Dinah Handy.”

“
Mrs
. Handy,” Dinah said, holding out her hand. “A dose of formality can only do us good.”

“Well,” said Heber, “I hope you won’t mind but I mean to call you Sister Dinah. And I’m Brother Heber. We’re all brothers and sisters, because we’re all children of God. At least I know
I
am.”

“If I had known you came from such an exalted family, sir, I would have done a curtsy,” said Dinah.

Heber grinned at her again. It got under her skin, the way he looked at her, as familiarly as if he had known her for years. What does he see when he looks at me? Everyone in her life knew who she was, knew the story of her life, more or less, and looked at her in a certain way, as a certain person. But Heber Kimball looked at her as if he knew the secret history of another life that no one else had seen. It made her feel at once violated and glad.

It was the gladness that won. She could not help but answer his grin with a smile. She regretted it at once, when he crushed her hand in his and shook her. She managed to pull away before he could bruise her, and the four of them pulled chairs near to the fire.

“Heber thinks that I’m a good prospect for religious conversion,” said Charlie, winking at her. “He wants me to become a Mormonite.”

“Actually I don’t think you’re such a good prospect for Mormonism,” said Heber. “I just think you’re a good prospect for hell if you
don’t
become a Mormon.”

“Heber ate dinner with us,” Anna said. “And we’d like him to sing for his supper. We want him to tell us about his America and his religion and—whatever.”

Ah, thought Dinah. There’ll be no privacy tonight. This stranger will be here until I have to leave. As soon as she knew what the inevitable course of the evening was, Dinah resolved to bear it well. And hearing to this man preach couldn’t be worse than staying home waiting for Matthew in the silent six-room house. Besides, she didn’t have to listen. She could sit and let the words pass through her while she watched the fire and felt the heat of it on her skin, using up her senses so she didn’t have to pay attention to
anything
. That was good, that was the next best thing to not existing, when she could glide along without having to care.

But Heber Kimball would not let her do it. He spoke as if Dinah were the only person listening, constantly referring to her, asking her questions, making sure she understood.

The tale he told was not of strange dogma. It was the story of a farmboy who saw an angel, and suffered much from the abuse of his neighbors, but finally managed to translate the sheets of beaten gold that the angel had given him and publish the translation as the Book of Mormon. He told on: How Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery received the priesthood of God, not from any man, but from St. Peter, St. James, and St. John themselves, resurrected beings who came to earth especially to do it. How Joseph Smith was beaten, tarred and feathered, poisoned, chased, tried, imprisoned, but never convicted of a crime by a lawful court. How the Saints in Kirtland had tried to live with all things in common among them, like the early saints, but the world was too wicked for it right now. How they were driven with blood and terror from Missouri, and now were building the city of God on the banks of the Mississippi River, the Father of Waters. “Someday all the nations of the world will flow to Zion and sing the praises of the Lord in the gates of the city,” Heber said, and his eyes glowed.

“You sound as if you expect the Second Coming of Christ,” said Anna.

“Joseph Smith will probably greet the Lord himself, provided we can keep him out of jail for a while.”

“Your prophet has been in jail?” asked Anna. She had nothing but contempt for criminals.

“You don’t have to be a criminal to go to jail in America,” said Heber. “Just like you don’t have to be lazy to be poor in England.”

Anna would not be sidetracked that easily. “What was he convicted of?”

“He’s never been convicted of anything. They put him in jail because he’s a prophet of God. They keep sentencing him to death, too, but they might as well try to stop the tide as kill Joseph Smith, at least until the Lord decides his work is through.”

“Governments don’t sentence people to death for their religious beliefs,” Anna said. “This is the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth.”

“Is it? Well, then, you go explain it to the men and little boys who were shot down in cold blood at Haun’s Mill with the blessing of the Missouri state militia. You go mention that to the governor of Missouri, who issued a proclamation that the Mormons were to be exterminated or driven from the state. You tell it to the women who were raped on the road to Illinois, or the children whose corpses were covered only one inch deep in the dead of a Missouri winter, you tell it to them that this is the nineteenth century. I think they’ll tell you that the same spirit that put Jesus on the cross lives on in the hearts of evil men in this century. I think they’ll tell you that the lions that tore the Christians in ancient Rome are still alive, dressed like human beings and regularly elected to the legislature.”

“They really killed children?” Charlie asked.

“Blasted off one little boy’s head, and then he laughed and said, ‘Nits breed lice.’” With that, Heber launched into the bloody tale of the Saints’ expulsion from Missouri back in ’38, while the Prophet and his closest friends languished six months in prison under sentence of death. Heber was a master storyteller. By the time he wrapped the stories up with the defiant words, “We don’t figure to get driven out again,” Dinah felt as if the
we
included her.

“We’re building the city of God on the banks of the Mississippi, Nauvoo the Beautiful,” said Heber Kimball.

We are building the city of God, said Dinah to herself. She stared into the fire and wondered why she was not there, building with them.

“God speaks to us,” said Heber Kimball, and Dinah wondered why she could not remember the sound of God’s voice.

Dinah was vaguely aware of Charlie smiling at her now and then, whenever Heber said a particularly outrageous word, like
discombobulated
or
skewompus
, but Dinah did not want to share jests with Charlie at the American’s expense. She did not want to return to reality just now. Reality was Matthew, was leaving here with no more hope than she had when she came. Far better was Heber Kimball’s storytelling. Whatever the Mormons suffered, they could bear it because it had a
purpose
. What Dinah suffered had no purpose at all, unless God had something up his sleeve. God didn’t play surprises on the Saints. He told the prophet what was going on, said Heber. It was the safest world that Dinah had ever heard about; to know God’s purpose would arm her against despair. Joseph Smith taught a sermon the very morning he was tarred and feathered. He could bear the pain because there was a reason to have suffered it.

Without realizing it, Dinah did what Robert and Charlie had done years before. She discovered the face of God. Where Robert had found God’s visage in the hot ovens of the steam engines, in the whirring belts and rocking machinery; where Charlie had learned to pray to the face of Old Hulme, leaning down to open his mind to learning even as he chastised him stingingly with a ruler on the palms; that was the place in her mind where Dinah put the face she imagined for Joseph Smith. It was nothing so simple as supposing that the man Joseph Smith were perfect—she was not such a fool as to trust any man, especially one she had not met, with such faith. Rather she quite unconsciously found in Joseph’s story those things that she most valued in a man, all the things that her husband and her God should have before she could love them, and created a face that stood for all that, and began to believe in that face as an ideal. It did not occur to her that such perfection could not exist. The ontological argument was enough for her: if she could conceive of him, he lived, and all other men were merely flawed attempts to represent him in the flesh.

It grew late. Honor was asleep and Val grew more and more whiney. But Dinah made no motion to end the evening by going home. Anna finally said something about Charlie having to work in the morning and Heber said, “Good heavens, so late at night, and I haven’t even thought about finding a room at an inn!”

Of course that led to insistence that he stay the night, and he didn’t even bother to pretend to be reluctant. It was Dinah who would leave, and the stranger who would have the solace of her family. But Dinah did not mind as she had thought she would. She went through her good-byes as if she were in a trance. Charlie offered to carry Val home for her, but Anna glared at him and said that she wasn’t staying alone in the house with a strange man, even if he
was
an apostle, and so
she’d
go with Dinah and Charlie could help Mr. Kimball to his bed.

Anna carried Honor while Dinah carried Val. “I hope you’re not too annoyed,” said Anna, completely misunderstanding what Dinah felt. That was all right. Dinah wasn’t quite sure herself. “Charlie’s never brought a stranger home like that before. And such a man. He ate as if he had just learned how, and was proud to show what he could do.”

“And he talked as if God had taught him all the words,” said Dinah. She had meant to sound flippant, but she couldn’t bring it off. She didn’t feel flippant tonight. The mood on her was more akin to reverence. It was a bright moonlit night, and there was no difficulty picking their way through the alleys, along the paths, and over the footbridge between the Kirkham and the Handy houses. The moonlight was at such an angle that at one moment, as Dinah stood at the crest of the footbridge, she could see not the dark faces of the shabby buildings, but only the roofs shining brightly. The city on a hill, she thought, and when they see it men must come to dwell there.

That was where Dinah wanted to be—a place where no one could possibly starve because their neighbors would share freely with them, without interference from pride or shame. She wanted, most of all, to be in a place where the men who controlled her life were not selected for her by other men, as her husband had been, but by God himself. That would be her true home, not the six rooms where Matthew ruled, not that empty place. She had long felt homesick for a home where she had never dwelt, a home that she had looked for in poems and almost found sometimes; a home that now she knew existed, that now was being built on the shores of a vast river called the Mississippi, where a prophet had said God wanted his people to come. To come home.

They paused at the door of Dinah’s house. Valiant grumbled sleepily about being forced to stand while his mother fumbled with the key.

“Dinah,” asked Anna quietly, “can it be true that he has the power to wash away my most terrible sins?”

The words took Dinah by surprise. “Mother, if there’s ever been a woman without sin, it’s you.”

Anna smiled wanly and looked away.

“What sin could
you
have?” asked Dinah.

Anna gazed down at Valiant. He was young enough and sleepy enough that the truth could be at least hinted at in front of him. “The one that brought all my woes upon me, all our suffering upon us all.”

The idea appalled Dinah. Had her mother, all these years, blamed everything that had gone wrong in their lives on some fancied sin in her past? “Mother, what can you be talking about?”

Anna turned toward Dinah then, with all her fear and shame upon her face, and said, “I loved my husband’s body far too much and far too soon, Dinah, and because of my covetousness God took him from me, and with him all my hope.”

Dinah saw in her mother’s face, for just a moment, the young girl who was not taken—no, she gave herself to young and beautiful John Kirkham upon the banks of the Medlock thirteen days before their wedding. Dinah saw how every crease and line in the aging face that now fronted the same soul was tinged with that guilt. Dinah saw, and she embraced her mother and whispered, “Whatever sin you might have committed, Mother, you’ve already paid for.”